Niki Rudolph

Running to the Sink

As part of a month-long challenge to blog daily, I am joining a group of fantastic people in #reverbbroads11. Today’s prompt: Who or what makes you laugh so hard that milk shoots out of your nose and why? Slapstick, dry witty comedy, your kids, Monty Python? (from Kassie, http://bravelyobey.blogspot.com)

I am blessed with many funny people in my life, like my amazing husband, whose wit and irreverence are often only witnessed by me (I am honored to say), or my staff cracking up while playing Apples to Apples, or my three-year old being a three-year old.

However, you didn’t ask who makes me laugh. You asked who makes milk come out of my nose. There is only one person that wins that award, and that is my darling older brother, Cory. He wins that dubious honor since he knows exactly how to push my buttons, calls me out of the blue just when I need it, and makes me laugh uncontrollably.

My husband, Brent; me; sister-in-law, Beth; and Cory

After my parents’ divorce, my brother and I moved with my mom downstate. Mom mandated (with love, of course) that we sit down to dinner at a table (as opposed to a couch and TV trays). I think she might have regretted this decision on occasion, since Cory would start in on some random goofiness. This would inevitably result in my race to the kitchen sink to spit out my milk. Only once, to my recollection, did it come out my nose, but the burning sensation is still crystal clear in my memory.

Mom later mandated that Cory and I were not allowed to do the dishes together, since we never made it less than an hour effort with as much noise and laughter as possible.

Cory replicating a photo from our childhood on my wedding day.

On the four-hour drives up to my dad’s house, once Cory was driving, we would make up fake organizations from the three letters on other license plates. IGL = Intercontinental Gorilla League. Yep, we would do anything to pass the time.

And since he was three years older than, he was a senior while I was a freshman. We had one year in show choir together, which provided license for us to break out in song at a moment’s notice. It wasn’t bad if you didn’t mind only the alto and bass parts of Broadway hits.

I had a few extra years with Cory under the same roof, since he commuted to college, and given that he was (then) a night owl, it meant that my efforts at an early bedtime were interrupted by Cory’s late evening revelations (or just trying to pawn stuff from his room off on me). This would result in snickering and then laughing and then steps upstairs of my mom walking over to the stairwell. Before my mom reached the stairs, Cory would quickly whisper, “Quite down, down there,” right before my mom would echo, “Quiet down, down there,” which would send us into stifled laughter.

Perhaps most of our humor is a “you had to be there” kind of fun, but for me, despite all the sibling spats and the fact that he calls me Buffalo Breath, I love laughing with him.